When one talks about the basic personification of creative/regenerative processes in Egyptian religion, one must start at its base with a goddess. Of the many goddesses which grace the pantheon, Hathor is one of the most easily recognizable, and yet mysterious, of deities - even to the casual observer. So vast is her influence, Hathor existed for the entire history of the ancient Egyptian culture as a powerful and influential deity. Iconographically, the goddess usually is represented as a beautiful woman, swathed in turquoise (her sacred color) or red raiment, wearing a headdress of the sun-disk surmounted between two elongated cow-horns. In Egyptian, she is called Hwt-Hr, which is usually translated as "House of Horus", referring to the elder Horus (Haroeris, or Re-Horakhty). In hieroglyphs, her name is represented as a large enclosure with a Horus falcon within. From this, we surmise that Hathor is to be seen as the great sky itself, holding Horus within her womb, which is poetically referred to as "house".
In this form, we can see that Hathor is both a solar sky-goddess with a maternal aspect and a personification of the night-time sky as well. It is likely that these maternal aspects were combined via the cow attributes with her early identification with a much older sky-goddess called MHt wr.t (Mehetweret or Methyer), translated as "Great Flood", and referring to the nocturnal sky-ocean. This goddess, in the full form of a cow, is stated to have risen from the primeval sky-waters and as part of her various acts of creation, gave birth to the sun-god Ra, and after so bearing him, placed him (as a disk) between her horns. That Hathor is identified with MHt wr.t is certain by references of the two as one in the Book of the Dead (Spell 186) where both are referred to as the wD3t (wadjet, or "Eye of Horus"). However, this ancient cow-goddess appears to have had no independent cult of her own, and was likely a conceptual figure of primeval creation; it is presumed that Hathor absorbed most of her sky attributes as early as the Old Kingdom, as exhibited by the many references of the two as identical in both the Pyramid and Coffin Texts.
Thus established as the "mistress of the sky", Hathor's identification with the sun-god gives rise to the various means by which she rules and influences the sun, and by mythological extension, the king on earth as the "Living Horus". In myth, she is referred to as both the Mother and Daughter of Ra, serving as both his purpose to continue his daily cycle, and alternately as an agent of his will. So, at dawn, Hathor gives birth to the sun through the moisture of mist, recalling her MHt wr.t attributes as described above. As the day progresses, so changes the image of the goddess, with her rosy dawn maternal aspect giving way in a "glittering" effect to the clear turquoise sky of day. In this way, the ancient Egyptians saw Hathor as beauteously dancing ahead of the sun, and with the rattling and shaking of the sistrum and mnj.t (menat) necklace, she provided a seductive means of attracting the sun to follow her. That Ra is compelled to follow her is expressed in the following hymn to Hathor from the 18th Dynasty:
The beauty of your face
Glitters when you rise
Oh come in peace.One is drunk
At your beautiful face,
O Gold, Hathor.More than a flirtation, Hathor grants Ra life, love, and charisma, as well as a beneficent and ecstatic awareness of life about him. From her, he receives and gives love to her and all life about her, of which she is mistress.
From the midday phase onwards, however, Hathor changes yet again, becoming ever younger, to the solar Daughter of Ra. In so becoming the sun's daughter, she provides a counterbalance to the older and fiery aspect of the sun-god. As his child, she distracts and placates his irascible heat, preventing it from overwhelming the land.
However, it is also in this aspect that Hathor provides the greatest danger of all - to both man and god. For, it is in her "daughter" aspect that Hathor may be transformed into Ra's "Fiery Eye" - the intense heat of the sun which can kill. In the "daughter" aspect, she sits upon the brow of Ra as a coiled cobra, breathing flames and venom at the enemies of the god. The heat of the goddess can only be withstood by the god himself as Osiris learns when he places her upon his head to "appear like Ra", and is struck with a great swelling or boil upon his brow, which can be healed only by the elder sun-god. This aspect can exist in two forms, either independently as an entity (wDAt, or wadjet), or as an extension of Ra as the jrt (iret), with a cobra determinative, as the "Doer" Eye of Ra. In the "Eye" aspect, the darker facets of Hathor's nature are brought to the forefront, with elements of terror, uncontrollable rage, and vengeance hallmarking its attributes. This makes Hathor a goddess to be reckoned with, and in need of appeasement herself from her own sacred instruments, and by means of inebriation, as exhibited in the myth of the Destruction of Mankind, when Ra deceives Hathor (as Sekhmet, a personification of the jrt Eye) with beer colored red to resemble blood. Once appeased by intoxicants, music and dance, she reverts to her beneficent form of Hathor, and returns to the arms of her father, Ra.
Without this untamed aspect of Hathor, however, life itself could not exist. For that reason, she is both respected and feared, and her various festivals work to assure her continued favor to the existence of the world. However, to assure its continued existence, it must be set into order: there again is Hathor needed, to provide balance to her creation.
A full version of the above article was most recently featured in the January, 1998 issue of the British journal,
InScription: Journal of Ancient Egypt
under the title,
The Guiding Feminine: Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (A Four-Part Series)
"Hathor: Part I: Symbol of Attraction and Power"
and is reproduced here with the permission of the author and the publisher.
To respond to the author:
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